by  Arbron

Don’t act innocent, you know what I mean.  Spreadsheet software is oh so easy to use and so inexpensive (or even free).  You can use it to keep your company books, to keep your budget and forecast, to keep lists of customers, to create invoices, to create sales orders, reporting and analytics, inventory…the list goes on and on.

It is time for a spreadsheet intervention!

Following are the top 10 reasons you should stop and reconsider the use of spreadsheets in your business:

1. Sometimes the creator of the spreadsheet doesn’t know what they are doing and the calculations are incorrect.
2. If you make changes to values on a spreadsheet and save it you no longer know what the original value was.  Unless you saved a version off first, creating yet another spreadsheet.
3. If you have lots of versions, on hard drives, in email, on various computers you have no single version of the truth – whose spreadsheet is right?
4. Often the creator of the spreadsheet leaves it on the hard drive of the computer.  And often that hard drive isn’t backed up.
5. While we are on the subject of security risks, what do you think happens to all those spreadsheets you mail around?  Any idea where they go?
6. As you put more and more stuff into your spreadsheet the more unwieldy it becomes.
7. As you put more and more stuff into your spreadsheet and make multiple copies because of versioning you are now eating up disk space.  Every day.
8. They waste time.  If you pay someone to do a repetitive task in a spreadsheet, add up how much time they spend on it each week.  Then find out how much it would cost to automate that task.  The numbers are usually enlightening.
9. The second you save the spreadsheet the data is old.  Inventory is not up to date, customer contact information isn’t accurate, accounts are stale.
10. It isn’t scalable.  You can’t continue to use spreadsheets as an integral part of your business for very long without running into roadblocks from bad or inaccurate data or the sheer manhours required to keep up with them.  Your company will grow, I’m sure of it, and if you rely heavily on spreadsheets you will get mired in the muck at some point.
11. You can’t easily integrate the data from one spreadsheet to another.  So you copy and paste date, duplicating it and opening it up to errors or staleness.

See I couldn’t stop at 10.  I could go on even further but I think I’ve made my point.

Today’s business owners are fortunate – there are software solutions for most business needs and small businesses can get great functionality for free or low-cost.  CRM systems to keep up with customers, accounting systems for your numbers, inventory application and the rest are plentiful, have great functionality and have been tested to ensure the data and information they produce is correct.

I am not a spreadsheet hater – I think there are good uses for spreadsheets.  One time financial or what-if analysis.  As a front-end to a database for more detailed analysis and reporting.  For lists.  But not as an integral part of running a business of any size.  Its just not good business.